Last Chance Foods: On a Mission to Save Kubbeh

Friday, March 01, 2013

“
"I hope... that some food producer will decide to make them commercially, so that this whole little world of our culinary culture does not disappear."

— Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food

Cookbook author Claudia Roden made a grim prediction in her 1996 tome The Book of Jewish Food. She wrote that kubbeh, a traditional Jewish-Iraqi dish of semolina dumplings in soup, might soon disappear because restaurants and home cooks were abandoning the time and labor-intensive recipe.

“I hope Jerusalem keeps up her reputation as the capital and that some food producer will decide to make them commercially, so that this whole little world of our culinary culture does not disappear,” wrote Roden.

When culinary curator Naama Shefi read those words, she considered it a call to arms and created The Kubbeh Project, a three-week pop-up restaurant that opens at Zucker Bakery in the East Village today. She partnered with chef Itamar Lewensohn to help preserve the culinary traditions surrounding kubbeh.

Shefi said that she found it difficult to even track down accurate recipes for making kubbeh. Oftentimes the home cooks and grandmothers most adept at making the dish merely rely on experience and feel, rather than exact measurements.

For The Kubbeh Project, which will be open until March 21, Lewensohn and Shefi will make large pots of kubbeh and serve customers until they run out. In the process of opening the restaurant, Shefi has become comparatively expert at making the dumplings. She explained that the shell is made from a combination of semolina, water, oil, and bulgar wheat.

“You have this dough — it’s not really a dough, but this mixture,” Shefi said. “You let it sit, and then you take, like, [a] pingpong ball shape and with your hands, you do like a little circle. Then you put the meat mixture into it and close it very, very carefully and quick[ly].”

The dumplings need to be sealed quickly so they don’t fall apart, and the shell should not be very thick. Instead, the wrapper has to balance and blend with the filling of seasoned meat or vegetables.

(Photo: Naama Shefi/Katherine Needles)

The hurdles don’t stop there. Another important component of the dish is the soup in which the dumplings are simmered. The soup and fillings vary, and beet and pumpkin are just two traditional flavors.

“You really need to have an amazing soup,” said Shefi. “What makes it so interesting, I think, is that the shell absorbs the flavors of the soup. It’s like really [about] the relationship between the kubbeh and the soup.” The dumplings also derive their color from the liquid.

While many other cultures in the Middle East have versions of kubbeh, Shefi says that this variation stands out because of how labor intensive it is to make and because it’s simmered in soup.

“I don’t think [this type of kubbeh] is particularly Jewish, but because it’s super time- and labor-intensive, Jews used to make it for Shabbat and other special occasions,” she said. Shefi added that since it can be cooked in soup for a long time, kubbeh can be served without breaking Shabbat.

In this video, chef Yotam Ottolenghi visited a restaurant in Jerusalem to learn how to make kubbeh. Even he admitted having difficulty reproducing the dish at home. Fortunately for New Yorkers, The Kubbeh Project will be serving up ready made dishes of the Jewish-Iraqi comfort food for a few more weeks.

While The Kubbeh Project is keeping their kubbeh recipes under wraps for the moment, they did share a less intimidating recipe for chef Lewensohn’s savory hand-pies. (See below.)

Guests:

Hosted by:

Tags:

More in:

Joy Y. Wang covers food and culture for WNYC. In October 2009, she created the weekly WNYC All Things Considered segment, Last Chance Foods. The seasonal food segment features farmers, chefs, and food writers talking about everything from growing asparagus to hunting wild turkey.

Comments [5]

Great recipe, thanks.One of the top ten reasons for making aliyah is that they have 4 different kinds of frozen kubbeh in the supermarket. (If cheating works and it makes it easy...go for it).BTW other reasons: ONE seder, K for P dogfood.

With Leonard Lopate giving so much airtime to food, food, food those of us who eat to live rather than the reverse could wish that the evening news not let food topics eat up so much time as well. I grant that these can be interesting topics for many, but the station has become a bit unbalanced.

Feeds

WNYC 93.9 FM and AM 820 are New York's flagship public radio
stations, broadcasting the finest programs from NPR, PRI and American Public Media, as well as a wide range of award-winning local
programming. WNYC is a division of
New York Public Radio.